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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "cost"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Fri, 5 Dec 2014 06:05:21 PSTYet Another Study Proclaims U.S. Broadband Awesome If You Intentionally Ignore All The WartsKarl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20141201/05212029282/yet-another-study-proclaims-us-broadband-awesome-if-you-intentionally-ignore-all-warts.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20141201/05212029282/yet-another-study-proclaims-us-broadband-awesome-if-you-intentionally-ignore-all-warts.shtmlFCC, the the OECD, OOkla's Net Index or walk next door and ask your neighbor. We're average or worse on metrics like speed (three quarters of the country has no competitive option at speeds faster than 25 Mbps), penetration, price and adoption, and we're among the worst anywhere when it comes to customer service. In fact U.S. broadband customer service is so bad, people rank the IRS, banking industry, insurance companies and the airlines higher.

That said, it's endlessly amusing to watch the broadband industry (and its varied assortment of fauxcademics, sock puppets, think tankers, lobbyists and PR tendrils) time and time and time again declare that U.S. broadband is secretly incredibly awesome, and the people stuck paying $100 for a sub 3 Mbps DSL connection and mandatory (though unwanted) landline aren't looking at the numbers right.

The latest study of this type comes courtesy of our friends over at the Verizon, Comcast and AT&T funded American Enterprise Institute, whose latest analysis (pdf) compares U.S. broadband to only other G7 countries, since a broader global comparison makes us look worse. Unsurprisingly, the AEI finds we're competitive under this criteria if you look at specific metrics in just the right way, ignore all previous studies, tilt your head just the right way, and ignore the industry's awful customer service. The study resulted in websites like Vox recently running articles with headlines like "American broadband is better than you think." Much of the AEI data is sound, it's just highly selective and selectively re-arranged.

For example the study is quick to point out that the United States has done a better job at deploying the latest DOCSIS 3.0 cable network upgrades than other G7 countries. That's not particularly surprising. The predominant connectivity option overseas is DSL, which costs significantly more to upgrade to fiber to the home, while U.S. cable networks were relatively inexpensive to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 (Comcast is on record stating DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade costs were "the kind of money we can find in the sofa cushions"). The fact that we're leading in a highly specific metric certainly makes a very lovely chart:

The fact the United States leads in DOCSIS 3.0 deployment becomes less sexy when you realize that two-thirds of U.S. consumers still only have one competitive choice when it comes to speeds above 25 Mbps. That one choice is thanks to (you guessed it) DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades, which while an improvement still lag on the upstream side of the equation, which is why your cable speeds tend to be so top heavy (say 30 Mbps downstream, 2 Mbps upstream). But while the United States has more cable in the ground than Europe sounds nice, it's kind of like observing that Europe has different trees. It's perhaps notable, but doesn't refute U.S. broadband mediocrity. Also worth noting (since the study doesn't): companies like AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. are simply giving up on DSL in many markets, leaving cable the only game in town.

Similarly, the study makes a big deal out of the fact the United States leads many G7 countries when it comes to the number of total fiber based connections, a metric that includes fiber to the home connections like Google Fiber, and the slower and much less costly fiber to the node connections like AT&T U-Verse. Of course, all G7 countries (sans Japan) have struggled with broad fiber deployment, since it's very fashionable to throw subsidies at your regional incumbent telco for fiber, then hope for the best. According to the Fiber to the Home Council website, there are now 640,000 North American households receiving fiber to the home service with connection speeds of at least 100 megabits per second after a generation of broadband subsidies. Hooray for us, I guess?

The study makes light of all price studies that came before it, arguing that every earlier study and stat firm in the world managed to get their broadband price calculations wrong, but a think tank employed in part by the nation's largest ISPs has cornered the market on sound broadband pricing analysis. AEI appears to be largely fixated on a recent study by the Open Technology Institute, which noted that U.S. cities are falling behind when it comes to broadband pricing (with the exception of cities that build their own networks like Chattanooga):

"Our findings show that the average cost of plans in nearly every speed tier we selected is higher in the U.S. than in Europe, and seven of the nine U.S. cities surveyed for the report have average prices that are higher than the median for plans offered between 25 and 50 Mbps download speeds...We found similar results when comparing the average speed of plans ranging from $35 to $50, and the average data cap for mobile broadband plans ranging from $35 to $45."

U.S. incumbent broadband pricing has long taken a particular beating when compared to places like Paris, where regulators took our discarded idea of local loop unbundling (opening up the incumbent networks to third party competition) and made it work. The result? Stories like this, where people visit Paris and are shocked to learn that Parisians can get 100 Mbps broadband, 250 cable channels, home phone service and a wireless phone with 3 GB of data -- for $63 a month. Yet to hear the AEI study author tell it in a blog post, France got it wrong, and the U.S. (where those same services will likely run you $250 or more a month) has it oh so right:

"In reality, the nations that have treated broadband networks as public utilities are high on promises and low on results. France and Italy are the truest examples of the utility model for broadband; wired broadband in France is no faster than mobile broadband, and Italy has the slowest networks in the G7. Both Italy and France have promised heavy subsidies to broadband carriers for upgraded networks, but austerity measures and other budget constraints have prevented the subsidies from materializing. Overall, broadband users in the US, Japan, and Canada have the best services, and those in Germany, France, and Italy have the worst among G7 nations. Careful examination of the data shows that the US is fundamentally on the right track; policy makers are well advised to stay the course."

Stay the course! Maintain the status quo! Ignore the lumpy fat man behind the curtain! The study takes the very long way home to ultimately conclude that America's actually doing a really good job at broadband, and therefore the sector should be deregulated even further. Obviously you can manipulate any data set with enough elbow grease and pie charts. That certainly works for broadband, at least until you actually go visit some of these duopoly markets (like my former hometown of Binghamton, NY) where your only choice is aging, over-priced DSL, or slightly faster, over-priced cable service -- both with an extra helping of abysmal service and disdain for the customer.

Everybody all together now: we're number one! We're number one! We're number one!

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]]>damn-lies-and-statisticshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20141201/05212029282Tue, 29 Apr 2014 14:03:10 PDTBrazil Passed On Boeing For $4.5 Billion Fighter Jet Deal Because Of Concerns Over NSA SurveillanceMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140428/17283127057/brazil-passed-boeing-45-billion-fighter-jet-deal-because-concerns-over-nsa-surveillance.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140428/17283127057/brazil-passed-boeing-45-billion-fighter-jet-deal-because-concerns-over-nsa-surveillance.shtmlcost-benefit analysis on its widespread surveillance. The NSA still seems to think that its surveillance is "costless" (perhaps beyond the $70 billion or so from taxpayers). However, as we've pointed out time and time again, distrust in US businesses thanks to the NSA's overreaching surveillance creates a very real cost for the economy.

And it seems to be growing day by day. Brazil, which has been one of the more vocal protesters concerning NSA surveillance, has just awarded a $4.5 billion contract for new fighter jets to Saab, rather than Boeing, which many expected to get the deal. And, Brazilian officials are making it clear that the NSA surveillance issue played a major role in throwing the contract from the Americans to the Swedes.

Until earlier this year, Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet had been considered the front runner. But revelations of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency in Brazil, including personal communication by Rousseff, led Brazil to believe it could not trust a U.S. company.

"The NSA problem ruined it for the Americans," a Brazilian government source said on condition of anonymity.

So, as someone asks in the article, did the NSA's spying on Brazil provide over $4 billion in benefits to the US? That seems unlikely. Maybe now, someone, somewhere within the US government will finally start to do a cost-benefit analysis on the NSA's surveillance that actually takes into account how people will react when it is inevitably revealed how far the spying goes.

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]]>costly...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140428/17283127057Mon, 28 Apr 2014 15:01:00 PDTPatent Litigation Cost US Business About A Trillion Dollars In A Quarter Century, Outweighing BenefitsGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140416/04183626928/patent-litigation-cost-us-business-about-trillion-dollars-quarter-century-outweighing-benefits.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140416/04183626928/patent-litigation-cost-us-business-about-trillion-dollars-quarter-century-outweighing-benefits.shtml
Techdirt recently wrote about the ever-growing flood of patents being granted by the USPTO. As we've emphasized, more patents do not mean more innovation; nor do they necessarily lead to greater overall benefits for business. That's clear in an important new paper from a team including James Bessen, whose work has been mentioned here severaltimesbefore. It builds on the approach described in the 2008 book "Patent Failure" by James Bessen and Michael Meurer, and seeks to estimate both the private costs and private benefits accruing from patents in the US during the years 1984 to 2009. Here's how the costs are obtained:

We obtain lower bound estimates of the private costs of patent litigation by performing stock market event studies around the dates of lawsuit filings. This approach provides estimates of total cost that are greater than direct legal costs and include the costs of lost business, the costs of management diversion, and anything else that reduces the wealth of a firm as the result of defending a patent lawsuit.

As for the benefits, these include:

upper bound estimates for patent rents, the stream of additional profits that firms gain from patenting, including gains from strategic uses of patents.

As the paper explains, this produced the following results:

We have direct aggregate litigation cost and aggregate rent estimates for 1984-2002. During this period, we estimate about $240 billion in private costs and about $195 billion in private benefits. Hence, private costs exceed private benefits by about 24%. Assuming average growth in private benefits during 2002-09, we estimate about $385 billion for 1984-2009. Private costs exceed private benefits by about 29% over this longer period.

One estimate by the researchers puts the total costs at about $538 billion, while another obtains an even more eye-watering $1.49 trillion. The latter figure is consistent with previous work from Bessen, done with Michael Meurer and Jennifer Ford, which suggested that patent trolls -- or "Non-Practicing Entities (NPE)" -- are alone responsible for $500 billion of costs to US companies.

The new study notes how the patent landscape has changed in recent years:

we also identify rapid growth in NPE lawsuits, in lawsuits that include a patent in the Computers/Communications technological area, and in lawsuits brought against alleged infringers in the non-manufacturing, software and telecommunications industries.

While patent stocks have increased at about 6% per year, the values of patents and the associated rents per patent have not changed significantly. The result is a widening gap between the private costs of patents and the private benefits received by publicly listed firms. ... the upward trend in private costs is far lower if we restrict attention just to cases where a practicing entity (PE) files suit. Indeed, without NPE cases, aggregate private benefits would likely exceed aggregate private costs in the years since 2002.

From this we see that one of the key problems that needs fixing in the US patent system is the parasitical behavior of NPEs. Pity that, once more, it looks like this isn't going to happen.

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]]>trolls-strike-againhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140416/04183626928Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:04:15 PDTTAFTA/TTIP: What Are The Benefits? What Are The Costs?Glyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140417/09391926947/taftattip-what-are-benefits-what-are-costs.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140417/09391926947/taftattip-what-are-benefits-what-are-costs.shtml
As we draw near to the conclusion of TAFTA/TTIP's first year of negotiations, the detailed differences are starting to emerge between the US and EU. But one thing they both take for granted is that it's a good idea. "Good" in this context is essentially about money: the argument is that concluding a trade deal between the US and EU will boost both their economies, increase companies' profits, create employment and generally make people better off. Of course, since all of those are in the future, the only way to justify those kind of claims is to model the likely effects of TTIP on the various economies -- of the US, EU and rest of the world.

That's precisely what a study entitled "Reducing Transatlantic Barriers to Trade and Investment; An Economic Assessment" aimed to do (pdf). Although it's not the only study, it's indubitably the most quoted -- its figures crop up in most articles about the benefits of TAFTA/TTIP. That's largely because it was paid for by the European Commission, and therefore forms the "official" predictions of the benefits that are likely to flow from the agreement:

An ambitious and comprehensive transatlantic trade and investment agreement could bring significant economic gains as a whole for the EU (€119/$165 billion a year) and US (€95/$131 billion a year). This translates to an extra €545/$750 in disposable income each year for a family of 4 in the EU, on average, and €655/$910.

Usually, those figures are repeated without further comment or analysis. That's unfortunate, because there are a number of important assumptions behind them. For example, the use of the phrase "ambitious and comprehensive" is no mere rhetorical flourish: it refers to the most optimistic scenario considered in the study -- in other words, the best-case outcome. Significantly, it not only assumes that all remaining tariffs will be removed -- since these are already low (around 4%), the benefit from doing so is slight -- but also many "non-tariff barriers", economist-speak for regulations and standards. Of course, what industry regards as "barriers", citizens may see more as protections.

The other fact that is almost never mentioned is that the Commission's figures quoted above all refer to 2027, and are the predicted gains from TAFTA/TTIP after it has been in place for 10 years. Leaving aside the difficulty of predicting the US and EU economies in 2027, it also means that the claimed increases in GDP -- 0.39% for the US, and 0.48% for the EU -- are cumulative gains over ten years, and amount to less than 0.05% extra GDP added per year.

Those figures not only refer to the "ambitious and comprehensive" scenario -- in other words, they are an upper bound on what is likely to be obtained -- but also fail to take into account key costs associated with the changes that TAFTA/TTIP would bring about. It's perhaps not surprising that the European Commission's own analysis does not include these -- after all, they reduce the already-small benefits yet further. But clearly, in considering whether to proceed with TTIP, politicians and the public need to have the full picture, and that includes the likely costs as well as the likely benefits.

Fortunately, estimates for those costs have now been produced in some new research. It has been commissioned by the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) political group in the European Parliament. That group has an obvious political agenda, but then so does the European Commission. What's important is to have a range of analyses of the benefits and costs of TAFTA/TTIP so as to be able to form an overall, independent opinion drawing on them all.

All of the four scrutinized studies report small, but positive effects on GDP, trade flows and real wages in the EU. GDP and real wage increases are however estimated by most studies to range from 0.3 to 1.3 %, even in the most optimistic liberalization scenarios. These changes refer to a level change within 10 to 20 years (!), annual GDP growth during this transition period would thus amount to 0.03 to 0.13 % at most.

That confirms that the very low GDP boost from TTIP, as predicted by the European Commission's study, is also a feature of the others. That's interesting for economists, but for non-specialists the new report's chief virtue is that for the first time it estimates the likely costs of TTIP. It points out that there are several major classes of these, largely ignored in the four studies considered:

Adjustment costs are mostly neglected or downplayed in the TTIP studies. This refers in particular to macroeconomic adjustment costs, which can come in the form of (i) changes to the current account balance, (ii) losses to public revenues, and (iii) changes to the level of unemployment.

These are costs associated with the changes brought about by TAFTA/TTIP. For example, removing tariff barriers necessarily reduces the income received by governments; the GUE/NGL study considers this in various scenarios, and comes up with a cost over 10 years of around €30/$40 bn for the EU economy. Costs are not calculated for the US, unfortunately, but it is likely that a similar figure would apply there too.

There are also significant labor adjustment costs, as some industries take on new workers, while others make them redundant. The report estimates these at around €10/$14 bn over the first ten years of TTIP. There will also be concomitant losses as a result of lower income tax and social security contributions from those who lose their jobs -- another €7/$10 bn.

That makes a total of €47/$64 bn. On top of that, there are two other important classes of costs. One is those arising out of corporate sovereignty payments. These can reach billions of euros/dollars per award, and are likely to become common given that there are 75,000 companies that could use an ISDS chapter in TTIP to sue the US or EU. The amount potentially involved is hard to quantify at this stage, as are the associated "social costs" of removing non-tariff barriers:

the elimination of [non-tariff barriers] will result in a potential welfare loss to society, in so far as this elimination threatens public policy goals (e.g. consumer safety, public health, environmental safety), which are not taken care of by some other measure or policy. Though subject to considerable insecurity, these types of adjustment costs might be substantial, and require careful case-by-case analysis. As we will see in the following, although the social costs of regulatory change are of particular relevance for the analysis of TTIP because of its emphasis of regulation issues, they have not been dealt with properly by the four scrutinized TTIP studies.

In other words, the cost of removing or harmonizing regulations and standards is not fully included in the calculation of whether TAFTA/TTIP is worth pursuing. Once again, that reveals that TTIP is currently seen purely through the optic of business -- whether profits are increased, not whether society must pay a corresponding, or even higher, price to make that possible.

While some will doubtless argue about the details of the new GUE/NGL analysis, it has the valuable function of reminding us that TAFTA/TTIP is not just about corporate profits, but also concerns the 800 million people who make up the citizenry of the US and EU. Until they are included in the equation, and their potential losses and gains factored in, any claims about TTIP's "benefits" -- even the tiny ones that the European Commission's analysis comes up with in its "ambitious and comprehensive" agreement -- must be regarded as simplistic, one-sided and incomplete.

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]]>profits-before-peoplehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140417/09391926947Fri, 9 Aug 2013 07:54:03 PDTCost-Benefit Analysis Of NSA Surveillance Says It's Simply Not Worth ItMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130807/01194124092/cost-benefit-analysis-nsa-surveillance-says-its-simply-not-worth-it.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130807/01194124092/cost-benefit-analysis-nsa-surveillance-says-its-simply-not-worth-it.shtmlcost to preventing another attack, and certain costs are simply too high. We'd be much less likely to have another attack, for example, if we grounded all airplanes permanently and never let anyone enter or leave the US. But, obviously, that's a "cost" that is way too high. Yet, for some reason the defenders of these programs seem to pretend that there are no costs at all. Yet, there are huge costs. We've already discussed how the NSA's surveillance activities are hurting American businesses and why the tech industry should be furious about these efforts -- and that cost is becoming clearer day by day.

A new study suggests that the direct losses to US tech companies from people and companies fleeing to other services (often overseas) is likely to be between $22 billion and $35 billion over just the next three years. Germany is already looking at pushing for rules in the EU that would effectively ban Europeans from using services from US companies that participate in NSA surveillance programs (which is a bit hypocritical since it appears many EU governments are involved in similar, or even worse, surveillance efforts).

And... for what benefit? We've already seen multiple Senators point out that the NSA and its supporters have yet to provide a single shred of evidence that the bulk collection of metadata (the Patriot Act Section 215 program) was necessary in stopping any terrorist activity. So the "benefit" on the other side of the equation appears to be absolutely nothing. How could it possibly make sense to have a program which costs billions to our economy -- and directly to one of the few rapidly growing and expanding sectors of the economy, which also has tremendous productivity benefits for nearly all other parts of the economy -- for no benefit at all?

The fact is that big terrorist attacks are flashy and attention grabbing. They pack an emotional punch. I still remember quite clearly watching the towers fall in NYC over a decade ago. But we have to face facts: those things are extremely low probability events. A recent look at the probability of getting killed in a terrorist attack compared to almost any other cause of death shows that you're much more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist. And the list goes on. Click the link above and it shows what incredibly small probability event terrorist attacks are.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't make efforts to stop terrorist attacks. We should. But they need to be within reason, and with a real recognition of both the costs and the benefits. We don't spend nearly as much trying to stop death from fireworks, yet they're 14 times more likely to kill you. You're nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist. Yet, we don't violate everyone's privacy to stop cops from killing people. You're 4,706 times more likely to be killed by alcohol than a terrorist. And yet... drink up. People take risks. We certainly try to minimize those risks but within reason.

If the costs are astoundingly high while the benefits are slim to none, then such programs shouldn't even have been seriously considered in the first place, let alone implemented and defended vigorously (and misleadingly) by those in power.

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]]>do-some-mathhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130807/01194124092Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:28:00 PDTHow Much Would It Cost To Store All US Phone Calls Made In A Year?Glyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130621/03390823552/how-much-would-it-cost-to-store-all-us-phone-calls-made-year.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130621/03390823552/how-much-would-it-cost-to-store-all-us-phone-calls-made-year.shtml
An early criticism of Snowden's leak about NSA spying activity was that the $20 million annual cost for PRISM -- whatever that turns out to be -- was simply too low to be credible. One person who knows more about storage costs than practically anyone -- well, outside the NSA, at least -- is Brewster Kahle, who set up the Internet Archive, essentially a backup for the entire Web plus a wonderfully rich store of many other materials. He's carried out a fascinating back-of-the envelope calculation of how much it would cost annually to record every phone call made in the US and store it in the cloud:

These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and process all US phonecalls made in a year. The NSA seems to be spending $1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more. Therefore, money and technology would not hold back such a project -- it would be held back if someone did not have the opportunity or will.

Kahle has made the calculation available as a shared document (on Google, appropriately enough), so you can inspect his assumptions there and play around with the numbers. It's also worth reading through the comments to his short post, since they make some interesting points. However, even if the numbers are off by a factor or two, there's no doubt about the feasibility of recording all US phone calls.

And that's for sound files, which take up quite a lot of space. Text-based information pulled in from emails, Web pages and chat logs could be stored more compactly. That would make the routine recording of vast swathes of what those in the US -- and outside it -- do online not just plausible, but so cheap in comparison to the NSA's presumably large budget, that the latter might feel it would be crazy not to do so as a matter of course.

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]]>cheaper-than-you-thinkhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130621/03390823552Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:06:00 PDTHow Much Does It Cost To Win Election To Congress?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130313/02101422307/how-much-does-it-cost-to-win-election-to-congress.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130313/02101422307/how-much-does-it-cost-to-win-election-to-congress.shtmlThis American Life, which was all about lobbying. One part of it revealed just how much time our elected officials in Congress spend fundraising, and the numbers were somewhat astounding. Both major political parties have set up phone banks across the street from the Capitol (because it's seen as demeaning to do the calls directly from your Congressional office) and members of the House and the Senate spend a ridiculous amount of time there. The report suggested multiple hours each day on average, just focused on raising money for their re-election campaign. It's really quite incredible.

House members, on average, each raised $1,689,580, an average of $2,315 every day during the 2012 cycle.

Senators, on average, each raised $10,476,451, an average of $14,351 every day during the 2012 cycle.

No wonder they're hitting the phones every day. Of course, since these are averages, and averages can be skewed, it might help to dig in a bit, and thankfully, MapLight has supplied all the data in a handy dandy spreadsheet.

Digging a bit deeper, we see that the campaign that got the highest amount of money is (no surprise) Elizabeth Warren's Senate campaign, which raised $42,506,349. That's a real outlier, as the second highest amount was less than half of that (Sherrod Brown, who raised $20,945,196). The lowest amount for a Senate campaign? Angus King, the Independent from Maine who raised just $2,964,323 -- though he's beloved in Maine and most people thought he had the campaign locked up from the beginning (which is a good thing, since we need more non-partisans in Congress, and King seems to be quite good). There were a few other campaigns around $3 million as well. At the very least, the data suggests that $3 million is the basic entry fee. The median for Senate campaigns pops out at $9,341,391 -- not far off from the mean. That median campaign was Dean Hellers.

On the House side, there were a few clear outliers, topped by Michele Bachmann's $25,894,721 -- though I assume much of that was raised back when she was running for President -- so not particularly representative. The other outlier on the high end: Speaker of the House John Boehner's $22,024,288. No one else came even remotely close. Third place was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who took in $7,640,467. Note that Bachmann and Boehner actually raised more than any victorious Senate campaign, other than Warren's. The lowest amount raised? That would be Eni Faleomavaega (who?) who raised just $110,570. Of course, he's a non-voting "delegate" to the House, representing American Samoa's at-large district. Similarly, another non-voting delegate, Gregorio Sablan (from the Northern Mariana Islands) raised just $111,145. The lowest amount raised by a winning voting House member would be the $212,068 raised by Jose Serrano. The median amount in the House (including the non-voting members...) is $1,350,902 (for Rep. Janice Schakowsky). That's just a bit lower than the mean, which is probably the impact of the two massive outliers on the high end.

Of course, this data only looks at the winners, not the losers, and you could make a case that that data is pretty relevant as well. Still, the data makes it clear that successfully running for office requires a lot of money, which is why our politicians spend so much time fundraising. If all that fundraising kept them away from making bad laws, perhaps it would be a good thing, but, of course, part of the problem is that implicit in at least some of the fundraising effort is that these politicians will scratch the back of the donors -- which is how we end up in a world where so many politicians seem to focus on crony capitalism and rewarding those who fund their campaign, over what may be best for their actual constituents.

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]]>a-lothttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130313/02101422307Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:03:00 PDTHotel Lock Company Wants Hotels To Pay For Fixing Their Hackable ProductTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120823/10320820137/hotel-lock-company-wants-hotels-to-pay-fixing-their-hackable-product.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120823/10320820137/hotel-lock-company-wants-hotels-to-pay-fixing-their-hackable-product.shtmlfully-licensed music in the lobby on your way out. You make sure not to ask the hotel staff for anything as you leave, lest something called a PARFF come after you. And as you're out frolicking on the beach, sucking in that gut and puffing out your chest (asexual insults FTW!), Zero Cool takes a small electronic device that costs less than your average Electronic Arts videogame and hacks your hotel room's lock, giving him access to all the tourist crap you bought in the past three days.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that this couldn't possibly happen. After all, Johnny Lee Miller is probably still too busy spinning in place from the speed with which Eli Stone was cancelled after two seasons (and again, I'm reminded that Firefly lasted one. Sigh...) to be stealing stuff from your hotel room. And besides, it can't be that freaking easy to hack into a hotel lock, can it?

The company’s response to that epic security bug has two parts–a quick fix, and a more rigorous one, both of which it plans to make available by the end of August: First, it’s issuing caps that cover the data port Brocious’s hack exploited, which can only be removed by opening the lock’s case. To further stymie hackers who would try to open the locks and remove that cap, it’s also sending customers new, more obscure Torx screws to replace those on the cases of installed locks.

The second fix is more substantial: Onity will offer its customers new circuit boards and firmware that ostensibly fix the problems Brocious demonstrated.

Not bad, right? We've certainly seen companies in the past react poorly when shown the security flaws in their products, attempting to silence those that point them out rather than just fixing the problems. So this would seem to be a step in the right direction, yes? Maybe, except for this:

But Onity is asking owners of some models of its locks of some to pay a “nominal fee” for the fix, while offering others “special pricing programs” to cover the cost of replacing components. It’s also asking its customers to cover the shipping and labor costs of making hardware changes to the millions of locks worldwide.

That's ridiculous. Onity sold hotels a product that had one job to do: keep the wrong people out of hotel rooms. The product does the job so poorly that $50 worth of equipment and a little technical know-how defeats it entirely. And now you want customers to pay to fix your bad device?

Even Brocious himself pushed back on Onity's statement.

Brocious criticized Onity’s move to put the financial onus for the fix on its customers after selling them what he’s described as fundamentally insecure products. While the free mechanical cap solution could create hurdles for hackers, he says that’s only a partial fix replacement until the lock’s circuit boards are replaced–something that’s not likely to happen if it requires millions of dollars in costs for Onity’s customers. “This will not be insignificant, given that the majority of hotels are small and independently owned and operated. Given that it won’t be a low cost endeavour, it’s not hard to imagine that many hotels will choose not to properly fix the issues, leaving customers in danger,” he writes.

It's an especially bizarre move in terms of public relations. How quickly do you think word will get around to other hotel owners, particularly small independent hotels, about how Onity designs their locks and treats their customers? This could be a win for Onity, if they go out of their way to properly fix their flawed product, but instead they appear to want to turn this into a double-dip of bad business.

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]]>and-probably-will-next-time,-toohttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120823/10320820137Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:29:06 PSTOnce Again, If You're Trying To Save The $200 Million Movie, Perhaps You're Asking The Wrong QuestionsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120124/03573817522/once-again-if-youre-trying-to-save-200-million-movie-perhaps-youre-asking-wrong-questions.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120124/03573817522/once-again-if-youre-trying-to-save-200-million-movie-perhaps-youre-asking-wrong-questions.shtmlkeep making $200 million movies. As we said at the time, that's asking the wrong question. It's makes no sense at all to start from a cost, and then derive back how to make that profitable. I could just as easily ask how can we possibly make $1 trillion movies in the future? The only thing that should concern Hollywood is how it can make profitable movies in the future. That could mean figuring out ways to make a profit on a movie that costs $200 million (and, certainly big blockbuster movies like Avatar sure seem to still be able to make plenty of money, despite being widely downloaded via unauthorized means). However, it might also mean making really good movies for a lot less money. Of course, we've suggested that in the past, and got mocked by Hollywood folks who seem to insist that any good movie has to cost a lot of money. That seems pretty presumptuous.

I'm a bit behind on this (the SOPA/PIPA stuff took up a lot of time), but filmmaker/actor/director/writer Ed Burns, who came to fame a couple decades ago with the massively successful indie film The Brothers McMullen, likely had every opportunity to follow the path of plenty of successful indie moviemakers: go mainstream. He could have hooked up with a big studio and been filming the latest of those $200 million bubble-gum flicks. And while Burns has appeared in a few big studio films (Saving Private Ryan), over the last few years, he's really focused on staying close to his indie roots. In fact, he's stayed so close to them, that you could argue his latest efforts are even more indie than his first film.

He filmed his latest movie, Newlywedsfor a grand total of $9,000 ($2K for insurance, $2k for actors, $5k for food, transportation, and other costs) and was done in just 12 days -- but spread out over 5 months. He used a three-man crew, natural lighting, found locations that didn't require paying, and filmed with a Canon 5D camera.

Of course, he's admitted that the editing and post-production work really brought the overall budget up to about $120,000 -- but that's still an incredibly inexpensive movie. He's also focused on using Twitter to market the film. In that interview, he notes that if you connect with your fans, they'll "work on your behalf" to help you do stuff. He's distributing it using VOD, and it seems very likely that it will make a nice profit (if it hasn't already), just given the low budget, and all the buzz the film has been getting.

Of course, no one is saying that all movies should be made for $9,000 (though, I'm sure some of our regular critics will pretend that's what I'm saying). But there is an argument that lots of really great movies that would never have been made before, now have the ability to get made, distributed, watched (and be profitable!) in a way that simply wasn't possible just a few years ago. Frankly, I'd rather focus on ways to help more filmmakers be able to make movies like this, than worry about how some exec at NBC Universal defends his decision to waste $200 million on the next "reboot" of some franchise no one cares about.

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]]>why-$200-millionhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120124/03573817522Thu, 1 Dec 2011 06:23:44 PSTHow Much Does File Sharing Really Cost Hollywood?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111123/03341616884/how-much-does-file-sharing-really-cost-hollywood.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111123/03341616884/how-much-does-file-sharing-really-cost-hollywood.shtmlmocked the MPAA for its way of calculating "losses" from infringement. In one case, the calculation was so ridiculous that even the MPAA had to admit that it had fudged the numbers. However, the folks over at TorrentFreak decided to see if they could come up with a more reasonable calculation by doing a thought exercise: what if everyone who shared unauthorized movies and TV shows via BitTorrent, suddenly switched to Netflix instead? How much more revenue would that bring in?

The answer? Not a hell of a lot. Now, the report makes a large number of assumptions -- all of which are laid out directly, and whenever possible, they sought to use a number that favored the MPAA. So they assume that every download is a "lost sale" and are extremely quick to inflate how much BitTorrent traffic is movies and TV. They also assume that all BitTorrent traffic is infringing. Again, the idea is to be as favorable as possible to Hollywood. In the end, they find that it's possible the studios might have made about $60 million more under this simplistic scenario. They then point out that the MPAA's own budget is greater than that. We can quibble about the methodology, but assuming that the methodology stands up, it certainly raises significant questions about the true size of the "issue."

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]]>questions,-questions...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20111123/03341616884Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:35:07 PDTPatent Trolls Cost The Economy Half A Trillion DollarsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110919/17065416018/patent-trolls-cost-economy-half-trillion-dollars.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110919/17065416018/patent-trolls-cost-economy-half-trillion-dollars.shtmlPlanet Money with James Bessen on it, we mentioned his new research suggesting that patent trolls evaporated half a trillion dollars in wealth. Now that research, done with Michael Meurer and Jennifer Ford has been released (thanks to Tim Lee for the pointer): The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls.

Note that this isn't trying to count "losses" like the entertainment industry in trying to make up numbers about what would have sold. This is a direct observation on value of companies sued by patent trolls, and looking at how much of their value evaporates in response to the lawsuits. The $500 billion number represents a total over 20 years -- from 1990 to 2010. But, even worse (and not surprisingly), the numbers show that this number has been going up. Over the last four years, the total decimation of value from patent troll cases has averaged over $80 billion per year. In other words, over $320 billion of that $500 billion came in just the last four years.

Does this mean that some of this money is being transferred to actual inventors? Nope. Again, the research finds otherwise. The incentive to inventors has not increased by nearly the same amount. The research points out that licensing companies could add value -- but that under the current system, they do almost certainly do not. And as the problem is getting worse, all Congress can do is pass some hapless reform bill that doesn't even deal with the patent trolls issue at all.

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]]>ouchhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110919/17065416018Fri, 3 Jun 2011 04:57:57 PDTRIAA Says There's No Value In The Public DomainMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110602/18070414532/riaa-says-theres-no-value-public-domain.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110602/18070414532/riaa-says-theres-no-value-public-domain.shtmlhearings for the Copyright Office concerning copyright on pre-1972 sound recordings, but I wanted to call out one particularly egregious and ridiculous statement from the RIAA. The RIAA's Jennifer Pariser claimed that there's no value to a work in the public domain. Apparently Pariser is unfamiliar with the works of Shakespeare. Or Beethoven. Is she serious? I mean, you could make the argument that it makes life more difficult to sell those works for the labels she represents, but those works have tremendous value. Pariser, of course, is famous for making ridiculous statements, sometimes under oath. Back when she worked for Sony-BMG she made some statements, on the stand and under oath, in the Jammie Thomas trial that were blatantly untrue. Only much later, after the jury had ruled, did the RIAA admit that Pariser "misspoke" while on the stand. One hopes she "misspoke" here as well, but I get the feeling she actually believes the blatantly incorrect statement she made.

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]]>true-colorshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110602/18070414532Tue, 10 May 2011 08:12:36 PDTHomeland Security Doesn't Do Cost/Benefit Analysis; They Just Do Fear And BlusterMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110429/23582414094/homeland-security-doesnt-do-costbenefit-analysis-they-just-do-fear-bluster.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110429/23582414094/homeland-security-doesnt-do-costbenefit-analysis-they-just-do-fear-bluster.shtmlit's incredibly wasteful (found via Julian Sanchez). You can read
the full report (pdf) by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, which probably confirms what most people were already thinking. Basically, Homeland Security has ratcheted up spending at a massive rate, and there's little to no effort to judge that spending against the actual risk reduction. That is, there's simply no one doing any sort of real cost-benefit analysis on this spending. The report seeks to do some of that, and what it finds isn't pretty. From the abstract (with my emphasis):

The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.

In seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of the massive increases in homeland security expenditures since the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, the common and urgent query has been "are we safer?" This, however, is the wrong question. Of course we are "safer"--the posting of a single security guard at one building's entrance enhances safety, however microscopically. The correct question is "are the gains in security worth the funds expended?" Or as this absolutely central question was posed shortly after 9/11 by risk analyst Howard Kunreuther, "How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are already extremely low?"

Among other things, the report looks at everyone's favorite DHS boondoggle, the naked radiation scanners at the airport by the TSA. Apparently, DHS was directly told by the GAO to study the cost-benefit and it refused to do so. The same is true of other DHS expenditures:

Indeed, at times DHS has ignored specific calls by other government agencies to conduct risk assessments. In 2010, the Department began deploying full-body scanners at airports, a technology that will cost $1.2 billion per year. The Government Accountability Office specifically declared that conducting a cost-benefit analysis of this new technology to be “important.”12 As far as we can see, no such study was conducted. Or there was GAO’s request that DHS conduct a full cost/benefit analysis of the extremely costly process of scanning 100 percent of U.S.-bound containers. To do so would require the dedicated work of a few skilled analysts for a few months or possibly a year. Yet, DHS replied that, although it agreed that such a study would help to “frame the discussion and better inform Congress,” to actually carry it out “would place significant burdens on agency resources.”

Of course, from a political perspective, this makes perfect sense. It's all game theory. You don't get praised and promoted for doing a cost-benefit analysis that saves taxpayer money from wasteful and useless projects if a terrorist attack happens. So the end result is that the incentives for everyone at DHS to just spend as much as possible in the hopes that it stops something, knowing that if anything bad happens (as it inevitably will), all of the blame will go towards anyone who said "we shouldn't do project x that would have prevented attack y."

Of course, the real problem is that this is exactly what our enemies would like. They don't care about "terror" for the sake of terror. They want the US to spend itself silly to completely bankrupt the country. And it appears to be working. That doesn't make me feel any safer at all, no matter what the cost.

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]]>you-might-die!!!!!!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110429/23582414094Wed, 3 Feb 2010 14:05:22 PSTWill The Recording Industry Pay For ISP Monitoring In The UK?Mike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100202/1818428012.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100202/1818428012.shtmlwondered if BPI would be willing to foot the bill, since it's so sure that it'll be cheap. After all, since the whole law is designed to prop up BPI's own business model, it seems to only make sense that BPI should be the one paying for it, right?

Turns out that we're not the only ones to think so. In a recent post about the DEB, Jeremy Silver (who I had the pleasure of meeting at Midem) points out that BPI is in the troubling position of trying not to make it sound so cheap that it's expected to pick up the bill, while still arguing that it's not so burdensome for ISPs to pick up the bill. But, various proposals actually are suggesting that BPI should pay the cost:

The Digital Economy Bill that is wending its glacial way through the UK parliament has produced an interesting row between the BPI (representing the interests of the major record labels) and the ISPs, telco's and mobile network operators. They are arguing over who should pay how much to fund remedial measures to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. The BPI is in a tough place since the cheaper they argue the cost will be, the more the ISPs respond by saying "well then you can pay for it." Minister Stephen Timms recently suggested the split should be 75/25 (with the BPI paying the greater amount).

Honestly, I fail to see why BPI shouldn't have to pay 100% of the cost (or, perhaps in conjunction with other copyright industry organizations) if such a plan goes through.

Silver recognizes the bigger issue of course, which is that almost no one actually thinks that a three strikes plan "will make a blind bit of difference," and that this whole game is really about rights holders "wasting their money by trying to control file-sharing." On that we agree. However, I have to disagree with his suggestion that the answer is a collective licensing regime, because I think that introduces way too many questions where it's not needed. A collective licensing scheme puts yet another bureaucracy in the middle, just for the music industry (well, not for long, because then suddenly everyone else wants one too: the movie industry, the software industry, the video game industry, the newspaper industry, etc. -- and why should it stop there, new industries will jump on board too: don't we need a collective license for people who view blogs too?). As it stands, I just think that we're finally seeing free market business models that are working, and it's way too early to jump in and distort the market with a collective licensing scheme.

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]]>come on, pay uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100202/1818428012Thu, 8 Oct 2009 15:11:00 PDTStill Debating The Cost Of EbooksMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091007/1433216453.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091007/1433216453.shtmlso expensive given that the marginal cost of an ebook is much, much, much lower than a physical book. ChurchHatesTucker points us to a recent argument against that claim by Andrew Wheeler:

Creating an individual ebook format -- one of the current suite of them -- costs roughly as much as creating a print-on-paper edition; the costs of the actual paper and ink are vanishingly small in this equation. Some ebook formats, such as the currently fashionable one, have a baroque process of creation that involves multiple transformations and iterations of quality control, which drives up costs further. And the cost per unit is massively higher for ebooks than for printed books -- infinitely so in some cases, since there are plenty of ebook editions that have never sold a single copy.

Now, the issue here, of course, is a fundamental misunderstanding the difference between total cost (or average cost) and marginal cost. This happens a lot -- especially among non-economists. But it misses the point. Total cost is important in figuring out an overall business model, because obviously you want to be able to make more than it cost overall, but it's a terrible way of picking a price. That's because the driving force in pricing is the marginal cost. Meanwhile, CHT also points us to a good rebuttal to Wheeler from Paul Raven, where Raven basically says that Wheeler is doing things wrong:

I'm not going to refute the claim that ebooks currently cost a lot of money to make. I am, however, going to say that they shouldn't cost a lot of money to make, that they don't have to, and that the longer they do, the smaller the chances of them ever becoming a viable industry in their own right...

He goes on to note that part of the problem is with the publishers themselves, and their inability to come to terms on a standard (and open) format.

But there are other problems in the ebook publishing world as well -- where it appears that some publishers are less focused on figuring out how to use the technology to improve the experience for readers, and more about how to screw them over. Charlotte Payan-Salcedo discusses her her recent attempt to buy some ebooks, where she discovers that the ebooks she bought require special software to read, including DRM that limits where the books can be read... and then discovers that the books "expire" after 180 days. She doesn't say it, but I'm guessing these are actually textbooks (both from the price -- $180 for two ebooks) and from the claim that they expire. When textbook companies first started offering ebooks, many of them were designed to "expire" after the course was over. I hadn't looked at the etextbook market in a while, and had sorta expected (hoped?) this silly concept was gone -- but apparently not. It looks like in this case, the publishers have figured out how to provide none of the benefits of ebooks, but added all sorts of additional negatives.

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]]>marginal-cost-people...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091007/1433216453Wed, 7 Jan 2009 04:06:49 PSTLame: Apple Charging $0.30 Per Song To Ditch DRMMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090106/1915023301.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090106/1915023301.shtmlinitial news about Apple going DRM-free, I saw it reported that Apple would let you convert your existing files to DRM-free. However, what was left out of the reports I saw (though, people in our comments pointed it out) was that Apple wants to charge you $0.30 for the privilege of getting rid of the DRM. Of course, you can just get rid of the DRM yourself if you don't mind going through the conversion process (though, even that's a bit of a pain). Either way, it's pretty lame to charge people to get rid of DRM. Why even offer that as an option? Are people really going to pay more?

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]]>do-it-yourselfhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090106/1915023301Tue, 30 Dec 2008 04:25:00 PSTMuch Ado About Nothing In Accusations Over Text Message PricingMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081229/0338583233.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081229/0338583233.shtmlripping users off with SMS text messaging pricing. As was noted when Senator Herb Kohl first tried to make an issue out of this, per message pricing is fairly meaningless, since most users of text messaging subscribe to bulk plans or even unlimited plans. Besides, if pricing really were a problem, then people wouldn't be text messaging so much. The fact that they're using it so much, suggests there really isn't that much of a problem with the pricing. Stross tries to focus on the actual "cost" to the carriers for sending a text message, which is tiny, but that, again, is rather meaningless. A year ago, Tom Lee pointed out just how silly such an argument is for text messaging. As mobile phones grow more and more sophisticated, if SMS pricing really is a problem, alternatives (such as mobile instant messaging) will grow as well, and SMS providers will need to adjust their pricing. If, however, consumers don't have a problem with the current system (and all indications are that they don't), then why is the NY Times even bothering?

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]]>focus,-people,-focushttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20081229/0338583233Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:03:00 PDTVerizon Wireless Massively Raises Rates For Text Messaging ServicesMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081010/1341502517.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081010/1341502517.shtmlsurprising 3-cents-per-text-message fee on top of every mobile terminated text message. That basically affects any company that provides some sort of SMS notification system or content service, massively increasing prices. As some have noted, most of those services bought text messages in bulk, where it cost around 1 cent per message. That means the cost of sending text messages just quadrupled. If you're already worried about the economy and working on tight margins, that could certainly put some companies out of business entirely.

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]]>margins?--you-have-no-margins?https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20081010/1341502517Tue, 5 Feb 2008 09:20:47 PSTThe True Cost Of SMS Won't Matter Much As Mobile Devices AdvanceTom Leehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080129/102107109.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080129/102107109.shtmlSlashdot linked to an entertaining analysis of the cost of SMS messages. Noting that many carriers are raising their SMS prices despite increasing demand for the service â€” demand which should be spurring competition â€” the author of the post figures out the number of bits in a text message and concludes that transmitting data by SMS is about 15 million times more expensive than doing so over a commodity internet connection.

But of course this isn't really a fair comparison. A commodity internet connection doesn't afford the ubiquity that a cellular network does. Comparing the data rate and price of voice traffic is probably more instructive (although the two types of messages are admittedly not transmitted in the same manner across the network). Taking AT&T's overage charge of $0.45 cents/minute and 13kbps as a plausible bitrate for a GSM call, my calculator says that SMS data is a mere 316% more expensive than voice traffic.

That's still not great, though. And there's no question that SMS prices are going up even farther â€” in the past year or so the Consumerist blog has been full of posts encouraging various carriers' users to escape their contracts thanks to those contracts' newly-increased SMS fees. It's an unfortunate situation: very few consumers select a carrier on the basis of its SMS offerings, and few will leave their carrier over them, either, blunting the consumer response to price increases. Plus, as the technology has gained popularity the mobile operators have lost the need to encourage its adoption through cheap rates. It's not very surprising to see them conclude that the most profitable price point for SMS is higher than the one they had been offering.

Fortunately for the rest of us, this state of affairs doesn't seem likely to last much longer. Although there's little reason to have faith in the mobile market's ability to bend the carriers to consumers' will, new technologies are going to inevitably dry up the SMS bonanza. We're on the verge of the iPhone SDK's release, and Google's Android seems likely to find its way into many cheaper handsets. These and other technologies mean that the average customer will have access to bulk data services on their handset soon if they don't already. And once bulk data can be consumed, so many options for short message communication become available that SMS's specialized role will disappear almost immediately. Between web interfaces, widgets, IM clients and email apps, there are a vast number of ways to send short strings of text. Services like Twitter that offer a variety of input modalities will no doubt help to stitch together this looming surplus of communication options.

Given how few bits are required to transmit those messages (and the generic nature of those bits), there'll be no way for the carriers to keep short message transmission as expensive as it currently is â€” not without without pricing web browsing, email and other mobile data services into oblivion. I wouldn't expect SMS to disappear, but it seems safe to assume it'll start getting cheaper soon.

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]]>it-will-work-itself-outhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080129/102107109Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:18:46 PSTRIAA Told To Hand Over Data On Cost Per DownloadMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071127/015039.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071127/015039.shtmlagreed to examine whether or not the fines the RIAA is asking for in its lawsuits against people accused of file sharing is constitutional (that whole "cruel and unusual" bit). The RIAA, in response, has fought hard to keep from revealing any information about how much a download really costs, but a judge isn't having any of that and has ordered the RIAA in the UMG v. Lindor case to turn over the data.